How Flag & Anthem Boosted Revenue by 44% on Unified Email & SMS with Attentive

From early email sends to a daily owned-channel strategy

Flag & Anthem has grown from its roots in men’s apparel into a broader lifestyle brand spanning everyday essentials, golf, western-inspired collections, women’s, collegiate styles, and more. As the brand expanded, its owned-channel strategy evolved with it. In 2021, Flag & Anthem migrated its email program from Klaviyo to Attentive, bringing its email and SMS programs together on one platform and creating more opportunities to connect messaging to each shopper’s interests.

For Senior Director of Marketing Beth Tusso, that growth has been personal. 

“I’ve been with Flag & Anthem since the beginning. When I started, it was our two co-founders, a designer, and one person handling production. Over the past 10 years, I’ve helped build everything from the website and social channels to photo shoots, trade shows, and our owned-channel marketing program.”
‍
— Beth Tusso, Senior Director of Marketing, Flag & Anthem

In the brand’s earliest days, the team sent a few emails each week. As the customer base grew, email became a larger part of how Flag & Anthem stayed connected with shoppers. During COVID, the team increased its cadence to a daily email, and that rhythm became a core part of the brand’s owned-channel strategy.

“In the early days, we sent three emails a week at most. As our list grew—and especially once COVID changed how people were shopping—we moved to a daily email cadence. That’s become a core part of how we stay connected with our customers.”
‍
— Beth Tusso, Senior Director of Marketing, Flag & Anthem

That consistency helped Flag & Anthem stay close to its customers. But as the brand expanded across categories, the team saw a larger opportunity: keep its high-performing email and SMS program moving while making every message more relevant to what shoppers browse, buy, and care about.

With Attentive, Flag & Anthem can bring customer behavior together across email, SMS, automated journeys, and Attentive AI to send timely messages without adding more manual work. Email deliverability has also been a bright spot: open rates improved to 55% and email channel performance increased 14% year over year during Black Friday.

‍

Keeping loyal customers engaged across categories

Retention is central to Flag & Anthem’s marketing strategy. The brand has a loyal customer base, with shoppers who return throughout the year to build out their wardrobes. Acquiring new customers still matters, but holding onto existing customers is just as important.

“Acquisition will always matter, but retention is a huge priority for us. Once someone discovers Flag & Anthem, we want to keep building that relationship and give them reasons to come back.”
‍
— Beth Tusso, Senior Director of Marketing, Flag & Anthem

That focus is especially important for a brand with multiple product lanes. Flag & Anthem has customers interested in golf, western-inspired collections, everyday apparel, women’s styles, collegiate licensing, and more. With high-profile moments like the Ryder Cup collection and Eli Manning partnership bringing new audiences into the funnel, the team sees a growing opportunity to make messaging more tailored to each customer’s interests.

“We have so many different customer interests across the brand—golf, western-inspired styles, everyday apparel, women’s, and more. There’s a big opportunity to segment more thoughtfully and send customers the content they actually want to see.”
‍
— Beth Tusso, Senior Director of Marketing, Flag & Anthem

With Attentive, Flag & Anthem can use customer behavior, engagement, and product interest to make each message feel more specific to the shopper receiving it.

Bringing email and SMS together around the customer journey

Flag & Anthem uses email and SMS to support different moments in the customer journey. Email gives the team room to communicate consistently, showcase collections, and support a high-volume merchandising calendar. SMS adds immediacy, helping the brand follow up when a shopper is showing stronger intent or when a message should feel more direct.

The channel mix is paying off. In Q1 2026, Flag & Anthem saw email subscribers up 21% year-over-year. And new SMS subscribers grew nearly 40%, contributing meaningful incremental revenue to the program.

“Email and SMS work really well together for us. We can introduce a message through email, then follow up with a text when it makes sense—especially when inboxes are so crowded.”
‍
— Beth Tusso, Senior Director of Marketing, Flag & Anthem

That connected approach matters most in high-intent moments, like browse abandonment. If a shopper is subscribed to SMS, Flag & Anthem can follow up through text messaging when they browse, abandon, or show interest in specific products.

The team has also used SMS as a VIP channel. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, SMS subscribers received early access to a 30% off sitewide offer—a five-percentage-point step up from the 25% discount available to the broader audience. The result was a strong weekend of SMS-driven revenue, reinforcing the value of the channel as a way to reward engaged shoppers.

Campaign sequences help extend that momentum. If a subscriber receives a promotional text message on Friday but doesn’t click, a follow-up message goes out on Sunday to keep the offer top of mind. It’s a lightweight sequence that helps campaigns work harder without requiring new creative.

Rather than treating email and SMS as separate programs, Flag & Anthem is building a cross-channel strategy where each touchpoint can inform the next one.

Turning lifecycle journeys into a stronger revenue driver

Flag & Anthem’s automated journeys are already proving the value of more behavior-based messaging. The team has a full suite of journeys live today, including welcome, abandoned browse, cart and checkout abandonment, session abandonment, post-purchase, and price drop.

Together, these journeys generated 5% more attributable revenue than campaigns while using 96% fewer sends. Journeys also drove 28% more conversions than campaigns, with a 10x higher click rate and 9x higher conversion rate.

That performance reinforces where Flag & Anthem wants to go next: more automated, more personalized, and more connected to the way customers actually shop. Beth sees a major opportunity to build out more journeys around product interest, cross-sell, and post-purchase behavior.

For an apparel brand with multiple categories and complementary products, customer behavior can open the door to more relevant follow-up. 

“There’s so much opportunity to make our messages more relevant. If someone browses a pair of shorts, we can follow up with a shirt or sneakers that complete the look. If they’ve already purchased, we can recommend what pairs well with what they bought.”
‍
— Beth Tusso, Senior Director of Marketing, Flag & Anthem

The challenge is bandwidth. Like many lean marketing teams, Flag & Anthem has more ideas than time. With Attentive, the team can continue expanding its lifecycle strategy while leaning on platform insights, expert guidance, and Attentive AI capabilities to help scale the work.

Growing the list with relevance in mind

As Flag & Anthem’s owned-channel program has matured, list growth has remained an important part of the strategy. Over the last 12 months, Flag & Anthem grew eligible email subscribers by 12%, creating a larger reachable audience for campaigns, journeys, and more personalized lifecycle messaging. SMS list growth has been even stronger, adding to the team’s ability to reach shoppers across both channels.

Big brand moments have helped accelerate that growth. When Flag & Anthem launched its Ryder Cup collection, the event drove a wave of new traffic and brought in over 3,000+ new customers. The team timed its AI Grow trial around the launch to make the most of that traffic spike, giving the AI Grow sign-up experience a strong window to convert more visitors into subscribers.

That growth gives the team more room to segment. As Flag & Anthem continues building category-based messaging across golf, women’s, western-inspired styles, everyday essentials, and newer lines like the collegiate collection, a larger list gives the team more opportunities to match content to customer interest.

The goal is not simply to reach more people. It’s to reach the right people with messages they’re most likely to care about.

Hands-on support helps a lean team keep moving

For Flag & Anthem, support from Attentive has been a clear differentiator.

When the team needed more help managing the program, Attentive was ready to step in. Beth described a moment when the person previously handling email and SMS was no longer in the role, leaving the team in need of more hands-on support. 

“When our team was going through a transition, we reached out to Attentive for help, and they showed up for us. We had weekly calls, clear guidance, and the hands-on support we needed to keep the program moving.”
‍
— Beth Tusso, Senior Director of Marketing, Flag & Anthem

That partnership has continued as Beth and Carley have become more involved in the program day to day. The team regularly works with their Attentive Customer Success Manager who helps provide data, answer questions, and identify ways to keep improving the program.

“We’re always reaching out to our CSM, and he consistently comes back with helpful data, clear answers, and ideas for improving the program. That level of partnership is something that really sets Attentive apart.”
‍
— Beth Tusso, Senior Director of Marketing, Flag & Anthem

Beyond day-to-day support, the Attentive team has proactively helped Flag & Anthem with email journey audits, segmentation strategy sessions, and competitive benchmarking. For a lean team, that support helps turn strategy into execution without requiring the team to uncover every opportunity manually.

Testing Attentive AI while keeping brand control in mind

Flag & Anthem is also exploring how Attentive AI can support a more personalized lifecycle strategy.

The team has experimented with AI Pro and AI Journeys, and the results are strong. AI Pro helped Flag & Anthem recognize more shoppers and connect more behavior to real customer profiles. That gave the team more opportunities to trigger relevant messages based on what shoppers were browsing, abandoning, or showing interest in—leading to a 28% lift in additional people identified for follow-up, 7% more incremental sign-ups, and a 20% increase in abandonment journey revenue.

Beth acknowledged that the performance signals are there. At the same time, she is thoughtful about how Attentive AI fits into a brand-led messaging program. That tension is familiar to many marketers: Attentive AI can help scale personalization and make faster decisions, but marketers still want confidence that the customer experience feels right.

“The metrics are there, and we can see that AI is working. The challenge is that, as marketers, we’re used to having a lot of control over every message. It takes trust to let AI play a bigger role.”
‍
— Beth Tusso, Senior Director of Marketing, Flag & Anthem

For Beth, part of that hesitation comes from years of hands-on ownership. She has seen Flag & Anthem’s marketing program grow from manually built emails to a much more sophisticated operation. Giving Attentive AI more influence over messaging is a meaningful shift.

That perspective is what makes Flag & Anthem’s Attentive AI story relatable. The goal is not to replace the marketer’s judgment. It’s to help the team scale the kind of personalization they already want to deliver, especially as the brand expands into more product categories, customer segments, and lifecycle moments.

Across Flag & Anthem’s AI Pro performance, Audiences AI accounted for 41% of measured AI lift, while identity-powered abandonment journeys contributed 30% and enhanced-tag welcome journeys contributed 29%. That mix shows how Attentive AI can support multiple parts of the customer journey, from recognizing shoppers to improving abandonment flows to strengthening welcome experiences.

The team’s AI Journeys trial reinforced the signal even further. Over a 31-day test at 50% of traffic, AI Journeys delivered a 44% revenue lift, a 46% lift in clicks, and a 28% lift in conversions, projecting to a 21.7x ROI at full traffic. And AI Journeys only sent 11% more messages for Flag & Anthem (below the Attentive average of 20%) meaning the lift came from smarter targeting—not higher volume.

With the right balance of control, performance data, and human oversight, Attentive AI can help Flag & Anthem reach more customers with messages that reflect what they actually care about.

An intuitive platform for faster execution

Ease of use also matters for Flag & Anthem. 

“I built an email for our wholesale customers ahead of a golf trade show, and the process was incredibly easy. In about seven minutes, I had three emails set up and ready to go.”
‍
— Beth Tusso, Senior Director of Marketing, Flag & Anthem

For a team balancing daily sends, campaign planning, product launches, segmentation, and creative production, usability helps reduce friction. The faster the team can build, adjust, and launch messages, the more room they have to focus on strategy.

“The platform is easy to navigate, and the drag-and-drop builder makes it quick to create image-based emails. It’s intuitive, efficient, and easy for our team to use.”
‍
— Carley Stamps, Email Marketing Specialist, Flag & Anthem

Connecting loyalty, reviews, and commerce data

Flag & Anthem’s Attentive program also connects with key parts of its broader ecommerce stack. The brand is integrated with Shopify Plus, which powers transactional messaging and journey triggers, from order confirmations to cart and checkout abandonment flows. The team also uses LoyaltyLion for loyalty-driven flows and has Yotpo connected to the program for reviews.

Those integrations sit alongside the team’s use of Decile for audience segmentation, enabling them to export audiences and upload them directly into Attentive for more targeted campaigns. Together, these connections help Flag & Anthem tie messaging to customer behavior, purchases, loyalty activity, and other details that can support more relevant lifecycle marketing.

The team has already started putting that connected data to work. Flag & Anthem added a loyalty points banner to the top of its emails, showing each customer how many points they have earned, specifically to drive LoyaltyLion sign-ups and keep loyalty top of mind in every send.

For a retention-focused apparel brand, a customer’s purchase history, loyalty status, review activity, and browsing behavior can all help inform what message should come next.

The next chapter: more segmentation, more automation, more relevance

Flag & Anthem’s next stage of growth is focused on making its messaging program more personalized and scalable.

The team already has a strong foundation: a loyal customer base, daily email cadence, growing email and SMS lists, a full suite of automated journeys, ecommerce and loyalty integrations, proven Attentive AI results, and dedicated support from the Attentive team.

Now, the opportunity is to make each touchpoint more specific to the customer receiving it. That means moving from broader sends toward more segmented messages, building out more journeys around product interest and purchase behavior, and using Attentive AI where it can reduce manual work or improve performance the team could not easily achieve on its own.

For Flag & Anthem, the goal is simple: reach the right customers with the right products, in the channels where they are most likely to engage.

With Attentive, Flag & Anthem can keep turning customer behavior into more relevant messages—helping the team scale personalization across collections, campaigns, and lifecycle moments without losing the brand control that matters.